Into Q2

"Been awhile." Snake Plissken.

Andrew Childer's work documenting the story behind "The Inalienable Dreamless" is now available on Amazon! Also out now, Black Powder \\ Red Earth V2 on Kindle and Hardcopy. The work that has gone into both of these projects has been very time consuming.

Work on V3 of BPRE is nearly finished. Inks and colored pages are supposed to be in this week, then I have to letter it and prep for the printer/Kindle store.

GDC 2012 was inspiring, as usual. Lots of great presentations, a chance to chat with other developers, see what their solutions were to common problems, etc. Also got a chance to hang out with my gaming Dali Lama - Sean Cooper! Good times :-D

As soon as we returned, the first code started coming together for the new BPRE game we are producing. I'm collaborating with Max again, you might know him as the cranky Austrian guy from the Gamespot series. We're already 3 builds in (we release new versions of the game weekly for testing) and it's exciting to have that fire again, seeing things come together quickly, while Altay works on the engine that will be powering the actual release of the game.

There's still a long way to go, but I think we're onto something pretty great, which is something I wasn't sure we'd be able to achieve after playing BF3 (which is in so many ways, the game I've wanted for over 10 years).

The new game I'm playing is Armored Core V, with Battlefield 3 coming out of a short sabbatical that was Syndicate co-op and the Mass Effect 3 campaign. The Syndicate campaign held my attention for less than 3 levels and the ME3 multiplayer simply wasn't my cup of tea.

Armored Core V has been quite the experience. It's kind of a cluttered mess. The core idea is good but OMFG the story really really sucks. Gone is the ability to choose your path through the game and here to stay is a linear campaign flanked by dozens of vaguely related side missions. I've barely gotten into the online element as no one from my "team" ever seems to be online. Ever. I've tried switching teams but to no avail. I've got about 3-4 hours in and I am just starting to understand the layers in the AC configuration screens. It's especially surprising considering I've played the past 2 AC games in Japanese with almost no ability to read and found them easier to navigate than this -_-

OK, what else.

Saw The Raid Redemption. It was cool but I'm not sure comparing it to Die Hard or the original Total Recall makes sense considering it was more of a martial arts film than an action film in that sense. At the end of the day, I still like Hard Boiled better, but I'm more into guns that punching people to death LOL Very skeptical about the new Total Recall. I like Colin Farrel but...

New GridLink presses on. More to follow.

Escape from New York

September has been a insane month. Lots of new stuff going on with Haley Strategic including a merch offering which pretty much sold out of everything in 24 hours from time of release. This is gratifying because I designed everything in the store.

As of today I have 4 new patch designs and 2 new shirts for the Non-Permissive Environment Specialist series, which is actually a Black Powder \\ Red Earth thing, that should hit shelves before x-mas 11. It's pretty insane and gratifying to see people posting images of themselves rocking the patches from CONUS to Iraq and Afghanistan. More to come there hopefully...

Speaking of BPRE, pencils on issue 2 are done and we are hoping to have the entire book inked before NY Comic Con so I can letter the whole thing and submit it for printing ASAP.

For fans of the games, initial design work has concluded and production kicked off on a new isometric BPRE action game inspired heavily by Bullfrog's Syndicate and Syndicate Wars. Over the past 4 months, I charted a rough sketch of the game out in pixels and then used the Starcraft II Galaxy Editor to make it "real" and by real I mean a fast and dirty proof of concept.

Incidentally, we launched a new BPRE website here. I decided to push the new material a little more caustic and go less with the Frontline Documentary-War Photographer vibe I had been trying to cultivate. I still have a BPRE coffee table book that I want to make one day with the images we made for BPRE and some short stories thrown in.

Back to Haley Strategic, you may or may not know that I was the lead creative and writer for the recently released Bravo Company MFG website. It's one of the largest video, photo and web projects I've directed and it is certainly one of my best commercial pieces to date. Learned a ton on it and am hoping to turn that on a BPRE short film in the near future (:

So what else...

I recently purchased the "new" Escape from New York Blu-Ray. Unfortunately, there's fuck-all that's new with it. Even better, turns out it's a foreign release Blu-Ray. None of the extras work on my Blu-Ray player(PS3) and the film was mastered with a deep green hue that doesn't match what's on the Special Edition DVD(apparently the definitive version of the film) at all. That's not to say it doesn't look OK, but they went deep and dark with the blacks and lost a ton of detail as a result. For those who know me, this is one of the first films that had a lasting impact on the way I write and create. John Carpenter and Kurt Russel went on to make The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China together, which are both master pieces in their own right, but EFNY will always be number one in my heart (:

I snuck out to Two by Four, a BMX shop in Pennsville, NJ, to catch riders from; FBM, Fit, Shadow and Subrosa as well a swarm of local kids tearing up a bunch of ramps, bars and some rounds of Feet Down and Bunny Hop. Highest jump was 3 feet 6 inches. Unreal and inspiring to see. We never had a clue any of this was even possible when I was kid. Want to go out and ride tomorrow :-D

Music wise the latest Sex Machineguns album SMG is dominating the iPod/CD player followed by the new Merry album Beautiful Freaks (actually available in the US via iTunes). SMG maybe the best record in the entire Sex Machineguns catalog, relentless shred and fun, the whole thing just gets me pumping. The Merry record is also the best the band has dropped since I first got into them in 2004. Every song is haunting, creepy and really captures distress in an incredibly catchy idiom. Both are highly recommended ^_^

New Syndicate title was announced by EA this past week. I am cautiously optimistic.

BF3 Beta began. After 3 days of play, I ordered a new video card. Long story short, I have a smoking card for a DX9 system. BF3 requires DX11. I had bumped to Windows 7 earlier this year but performance on a lot of my games and game editors, quite frankly, was terrible. With BF3 and CODMW3 right around the corner, I'm hoping the new card, GTX570, gets the job done and I don't have to grab an i7 to get the full performance bump I need for 60 frames stable.

Despite nearly a full month between locations, October and November look like more of the same. I was hoping to park myself in the NY area for a few weeks but it looks like that won't be in the cards now :\

OK. Hasta.

Black Powder \\ Red Earth Issue 1 is out!

The first issue of my graphic novel series has finally been released! I've been working on BPRE in some form or another since 2002. I've met so many people and learned so much writing this story, I hope I've been able to do them some justice in this work.

Click here to buy a copy! Thanks!

Revival

I've been watching a ton of anime recently. Captain Harlock(hulu), Gundam(original story arc stuff on DVD), Dougram, Votoms(DVD), Ideon(DVD) and the revised Full Metal Alchemist series is in my NetFlix cue. I loved the original FMA, other than the epilogue at the end of the series and the movie...it felt cheap after the intense drama of the series.

That didn't change the fact that FMA and Gurren Laggan were the stand out TV series of the 1st decade stretch of century double 0 for me ^_^

So much of anime and Japanese art has become saccharin in the past few years...I wonder if the quakes will change that? No people can go through such a catastrophe without some kind of catharsis. I know for myself, after 9/11, my work changed quite a bit. Actually, I didn't even know what to make after 9/11...that took a few years to figure out.

Pre 9/11 I was writing a series of short stories called "Sawtooth". After 9/11...I paused those stories and that's when BPRE was born. In the past few months, I've had a few ideas for a robot "war film" style anime. Maybe once I finish this next book in the BPRE universe, I'll finally be able to work on some science fiction stuff again.

Was I expecting too much?

I just watched a game demo of Deus Ex Human Revolution on Gamespot and apparently they've spent the past 3 years remaking the gameplay from the first Metal Gear Solid game at higher resolution. Yes, it's first person versus third, but MGS Integral and MGS4 played almost the exact same way from what I could see.

I'm sure there will be "trans-human" perks and buffs that are not in MGS but, honestly, those are just more weapons/items. Will they effect how I can interact with that world? Sure, but it's just another gun at the end of the day. Maybe the story will carry it. A good cyberpunk thriller isn't exactly common so they may hit that on the head.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was more than this. It might be a totally amazing game but after all the hype, teasers and interviews, I really was thinking this would be more than MGS 1.5. OK, back to the pixel mines.

Keeping busy

Quick update.

Graphic novel is up to page 30 with pencils and looking good. Seeing how my written pages convert to finished pages, I need to go back and revise issues 2-4 though or this thing would be well over 300 pages.

The novel. Act 1 is together as a rough. Taking my second pass through to add more depth and do rewrites as needed. It's 6 chapters. About 30k words, give or take. I'm debating posting pieces to the blog. Anyone interested in my work in progress?

Board game/RTS. Well I have one map cranked out and I am working on another. The funny thing is this started as the baseline for an FPS game, but considering our current resources, an FPS is probably a few years away still :(

Legos are by far my favorite way to prototype general flow of a map though. So fast to work with and it keeps you on a grid :-D

KillZone 3

Before you go any further, I enjoyed KillZone 2 quite a bit. The single player campaign, while featuring some less than interesting characters, at least had a good pace and felt like a decent war game. I loved the War Zone multiplayer, it was right along the same lines as the multiplayer system we had in the Black Powder | Red Earth FPS at the time, and I clocked man-months of time climbing the ladder within the game.

Enter KillZone 3. The intro movie is way too long. The menus feel cluttered. The single player...

I suppose I should pause to mention there will be minor spoilers here, but no more than the first hour of the game because I was so unengaged I just put the SP down and went straight for multiplayer.

The single player starts with a Call of Duty style shoot house level from the perspective of the Helgan only to find, wait you were the protagonist from the last game all along! How shocking. And you meet the leader of the enemy army, say some stupid one liner and then we are whisked back 6 months earlier till the end of KZ2. There's a bunch of terrible dialog, boring cut scenes and then we're dropped into a city that looks nothing at all like the cities I was fighting in during the last game. Everything has this shiny green/red tint...is that supposed to be radioactivity? When I came across my third giant hopping Helghan robot I knew I was playing a totally different game in a totally different world.

It was at this moment that I just dropped out. Why even call it KillZone?

Multiplayer while good, seems less exciting to me. I've played 4 of the War Zone maps and 2 of the Operations maps. They are good but I'm just not hooked in the way I was with KZ2. Maybe because I liked the campaign I had more attachment to the franchise but...I keep finding myself wanting to play Medal of Honor's campaign again.

I'll keep at it. If someone wants to try the campaign in co-op I'd be willing to give it another go, but 2011 is already setting me up for disappointment. I've got my fingers crossed for Crysis 2.